Sweet switch to Fairtrade

Britain’s biggest selling chocolate bar is set to become Fairtrade certified, giving a massive lift to thousands of cocoa farmers in Ghana. Cadbury's Dairy Milk will this summer triple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa sourced from Ghana to about 15,000 tonnes a year.Under the Fairtrade scheme, Cadbury will pay a guaranteed minimum price, even if the open market price falls below it, for Ghanaian cocoa.

Dairy Milk, sells 300 million bars a year in the UK and Ireland, according to the Financial Times newspaper. So its switch to the ethical standard is a major break through for the Fairtrade movement, which is designed to secure a fairer deal for producers in developing countries.Cadbury is the biggest brand of its kind to make the move - part of the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership, a £45m, 10-year plan to help cocoa farming communities across the developing world. It announced last week that all cocoa in Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and Cadbury’s drinking chocolate will come from Fairtrade producers.

Under the Fairtrade network, suppliers receive a minimum price and a premium on top of that. As a result, many items with the Fairtrade mark are premium products - someone has to pay for those higher producer prices, and it is usually shoppers.But surprisingly, in spite of the recession, while people are treating themselves to more chocolate they’re also buying more Fairtrade. “The recession has not affected purchases of Fairtrade goods - the rate of growth is still increasing,” Harriet Lamb, chief executive of the Fairtrade Foundation told the BBC.

Fairtrade is growing fast. UK sales were up 43 per cent last year - but adding the Cadbury products will be a huge boost. Sales of all Fairtrade products last year, from bananas to T-shirts, totalled £700m ($987m, €780m). Sales of Cadbury's Dairy Milk in the UK and Ireland are worth £200m.Cadbury buys nearly two-thirds of its cocoa from Ghana, and all of its cocoa for its UK products. It helped set up the cocoa industry in the country more than 100 years ago. The country is the world's second largest cocoa exporter after Ivory Coast. Cocoa is Ghana's biggest export after gold.

But the Ghanaian cocoa industry's future will not be plain sailing - the children of Ghanaian cocoa farmers did not want to become cocoa farmers themselves. They preferred to head for the cities to find work there. Their parents approved. Surveyed for a report by Sussex University, parents described cocoa farming as a job with "low esteem, low aspirations and too much drudgery".

Written by Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children